Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth. I even wondered whether the BBC had felt like pulling this first episode from the schedules, on account of the scene where chippy young BBC news journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) slipped a bribe to a police officer to gain access to the corpse of a murder victim. In this particular week, it was uncannily close to the bone.
Lyon himself would surely have relished being able to get his teeth into a story like the cartwheeling News Corp saga. As the story opened, we found him chafing at the narrow horizons and suffocating air of deference that surrounded his job as a reporter in the BBC's newsreel films department, where debutantes' coming-out parties and what the ladies were wearing at Ascot were deemed more urgently newsworthy than Eastern Bloc political crises or the new phenomenon of Commonwealth immigration to Britain. The latter was flagged up with paint-by-numbers literal-mindedness by a couple of black people walking down the street while calypso music played on the soundtrack.
Meanwhile, Freddie (pictured below) was declaring that "newsreels are dead", and that "we've bored the public for too long". Happily, help was at hand in the shape of a new current affairs programme, "The Hour", which was being prepared in strictest secrecy by the Beeb's Head of News Clarence Fendley (a donnish Anton Lesser). It was to be produced by the glamorous Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), one of Lyon's colleagues in the impressively decrepit crypt where they knocked newsreels together.
And for a presenter... well, thrusting, impatient Freddie thought he was the perfect man for the job. He'd also prepared his own mission statement for the new show, which he delivered to the Corporation's programming supremo like an ardent Apprentice contestant trying to convince Lord Sugar that he really had run a business selling pasta to the Italians.
But Freddie's rantings came to naught, since not only wasn't he the producer, but he wasn't going to be the presenter either. That honour had been reserved for suave, sleek Hector Madden (Dominic West), who was promptly dubbed "Gregory Peck" by Freddie. Within seconds of meeting Ms Rowley, he was trying to lure her out for drinks, and Freddie's own suppressed passion for her is obviously going to come under considerable strain as the story progresses (Romola Garai as Bel Rowley, pictured below).
If potential love triangle plus launch of revolutionary new TV show wasn't enough, writer Abi Morgan had also thrown in a murder mystery to keep the pot bubbling. This involved the murder of a scientist in a murky Underground tunnel, and then a follow-up bumping off of Freddie's young debutante friend Ruth, who'd been burbling on to him about some sort of giant conspiracy. She was right, and she ended episode one dangling by the neck in an undignified manner in her hotel bathroom.
I found the thriller dimension a bit daft, not least the killer who hangs around under lamp posts in a trilby and raincoat as if he thinks he's remaking The 39 Steps. Comparisons have been made between The Hour and Mad Men, probably because you could quite easily picture Jon Hamm in the Dominic West role, but this has none of the careful pacing and almost subliminal evocation of period and milieu of the American series. But we know the Suez crisis is boiling up in the background, because we keep being fed overheard snatches of news about Nasser and Anthony Eden, and there are five more episodes to go. Keep 'em peeled.
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